Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (17 page)

But not to the court’s chief Persian translator and Jost’s trusted guide Zamankhan. He had learned about Judge Kubsch what no one else in the courtroom knew—a detail that in the hands of the trial’s enemies could prove fatal. He had stumbled upon it on a quiet February afternoon with the ringing of the doorbell.

A young, willowy blonde woman stood at the door of his residence. The wariness on her face matched his and was reassuring to him. He buzzed her in. She had come for his services. She needed him to translate a file, but asked that he keep it in the strictest confidence. The emphasis seemed odd since the job appeared routine—the usual stack of official documents.

“And you are?” he asked.

The woman, flustered, introduced herself.

“I’m . . . oh, dear me! I’m Ms. Kubsch.”

The name shook the translator. For a moment, his gaze froze on her face—distinctly round, just like the judge’s, whose features he began to trace upon the young woman’s face. Silence overtook them until she broke it.

“My father thinks you’re the best at the job and didn’t want me to go to anyone else. He said I must see you. He’s
a bit, how shall I put it,
concerned
. You see, my husband is, like you, Iranian.”

He quickly returned his attention to the file once more. Among the pages were old deeds to a home in Tehran, other properties, a birth certificate, and several school diplomas. As he shuffled through them, the gravity of what was in his hands dawned on him. The chief judge’s son-in-law had fled Iran, like the victims in the judge’s court room. Her anxiety was suddenly his. If the news were to leak of Kubsch’s ties to an Iranian, especially to one who was on the wrong side of the regime in Tehran, the attorneys for the accused would find what they had been stalling for—a reason to call for a mistrial. The end would be even farther from reach.

That afternoon, the translator became the keeper of Judge Kubsch’s secret. The chief judge was no longer the unreadable, unreachable caped figure but a man with a predicament much like his own. Zamankhan had long known and befriended Noori, and yet, at the start of the trial, he severed all ties with Noori’s family and other expatriates lest his objectivity be doubted by the court. To become the trial’s most meticulous translator was the best he could do for Noori. To help the widow, he would keep his distance from her and those in the community who wished to pry into the court’s business through him hoping, in turn, to earn the trust of the police, the investigators, and the prosecutor. It seemed to him that Judge Kubsch had made a similar choice. To protect those dear to him, he would serve the court in an unimpeachable
manner to earn the trust of those who were most likely to doubt his objectivity.

The prolonged trial was not without advantages. The attorneys for the accused relied on time to stonewall the prosecution’s efforts. But time brought Jost unexpected gifts. The first of those gifts, though not yet the greatest, came in January 1996.

On his way to the canteen during a lunch break, Hamid ran into the prosecutor. The two greeted each other. Jost, without slowing his steps, cheerfully announced, “The Iranians in the audience can expect a bonbon from me this afternoon.”

“Really, Mr. Jost? I’m thrilled. Can you say . . .” Hamid called out, hoping to stop Jost long enough to hear more. But he only smiled and rushed past.

At lunch, Ehrig confirmed the news, though he, too, did not know any more. The two devoured their meals and hurried out of the canteen, promising the waitstaff a thorough update at the next meal. Ehrig offered Hamid a pearl of legal wisdom.

“Given the stakes, if the defense can make this last an eternity, they will. But it could backfire. In a case as big as this, surprises are always to be expected. Time may work just as much against them as it does in their favor. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot by dragging it on.”

That afternoon, Bruno Jost asked to present a document from the counterterrorism unit of the BfV, the federal office for the
protection of the constitution. Soon after he took charge of the case in September 1992, he sent inquiries to all the relevant agencies. At the time, the BfV had forwarded a key document. Portions had been declassified, and the rest was blacked out to protect its source. By December 1995 the safety of the source was no longer a concern. Therefore, the BfV had released the full text to the federal prosecutor’s office.

Jost was granted permission to present.

“I wish to enter this document as evidence because it directly substantiates the assertion in the indictment regarding state-sponsored terrorism and Mr. Darabi’s role as the coordinator of the operation. If I may read only a few lines.

A special unit called the Committee for Special Operations, in tandem with the Ministry of Intelligence, was involved in the murder of the Kurdish leaders in Berlin on September 17, 1992. The unit has long been hounding members of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan and is directly responsible for the 1989 assassination of Abdulrahman Ghassemlou in Vienna.
”

The judges issued a subpoena for the BfV’s director, whose appearance on the witness stand inflamed Darabi.

“Nothing! You’ve got nothing on me,” he shouted in German. “All accusations! Nothing but accusations! If you got anything, even one thing, show it right here. But you got nothing!”

“Hush your mouth!” someone in the audience shouted in Persian.

“The motherfuckers are here again. Don’t you shits know by now you’re no match for me?” he shouted, also in Persian.

No response came. The silence emboldened Darabi, as it always had throughout the trial. Each time they failed to match his belligerence, he grew more vulgar.

“Spineless sons of bitches! I’ll get your sissy asses. You wait and see!”

Judge Kubsch called the court to order and the witness began. As Darabi had promised, he offered very little. Citing German national interests, he refused to answer the court’s most critical questions. Yet the document, whose authenticity he validated, removed any doubts that had lingered about Minister Fallahian’s role in the murders.

The BfV document paved the way for Bruno Jost to do what he had long hoped to—reach beyond the underlings in custody to implicate the masterminds. He charged the minister with murder. In a separate filing in the federal court, he requested an arrest warrant to be issued for Ali Fallahian. Never before had any European prosecutor dared go as far.

Obtaining the BfV document was a triumph. But its blessings were mixed for Shohreh. It proved what she had known the day she buried Noori—that greater powers had ordered the killings. It was the affirmation, the vindication, she had waited four years to have.

But it also revived the rumors about the mole, the infiltrator who had betrayed the meeting at Mykonos. Its revelations credited “a highly reliable source who had been in
touch with and present at the restaurant that night.” Aziz’s testimony, albeit damning, had not proved his guilt and so the mystery had lived on. The old suspicions returned, this time surrounding Noori. They deepened her rift with the community, compounding her solitude. The seven bullets that struck Noori evoked more suspicion than sympathy in some.
The killers must have been determined to silence him, to make sure he’d not walk away alive and talk, or they’d have never wasted so many bullets on him.

But her ties with the expatriates were coming undone even before this. Her presence was discomfiting to most of them. Always dressed in black, she stood in their way of forgetting their sadness and shame—their collective history and the troubled country they had left behind. No one shunned her, but they seldom included her in their midst. On the rare occasions their paths crossed, they regarded her with pity, or so it appeared to her, in whom grief manifested itself in unattainable expectations of old friends. She felt more at ease with Germans. At work, her superiors were generous with extended leaves, and colleagues, whom she had never imagined depending on, divided the tasks she would leave undone.

And her love for Noori still flourished despite the years, the pain, even her own resolve to move beyond him. His wisdom had proved enduring, his foresight keener than anyone else’s. In the aftermath of the Gulf War and the declaration of the no-fl y zone over northern Iraq, Noori’s predictions had come true. The Kurdish homeland he believed was inevitable had almost formed. His lucidity in articulating the plight
of the Kurds in interview after interview—his breadth of knowledge about their predicament, his humility especially—illuminated him more brightly now than ever before. She wondered whether to remind Sara of it—who hardly spoke to her—or let her choose to cope by remembering or forgetting as she wished.

Sara had remained steadfast to her father’s memory. Her mother could not see that what ignited her daughter’s rage was love. Sara could not break the spell of silence between them, tell her mother what would have allayed her anxieties. She longed to be easy around Shohreh again, but she could not say to her mother what was on her feverish mind. She composed and recomposed the unspoken sentences, which always began, “
Maman,
do you ever see Baba?”

The question was bound to make her mother anxious, but it was how the imaginary conversation always began, though Sara knew her mother would ask what she meant by
see
. She would compel Shohreh to say that her father was dead and no one could see him, which in turn would offend her. The two rarely spoke and when they did they often circled each other like a pair of tigers, each on the verge of assault—one filled with fury, the other with concern.

Neither mother nor daughter knew of the other’s growing devotion to Noori’s beloved apparition, something that would have strengthened their bond. The talk Sara would not have with her mother always ended the same way—with the secret she could barely keep in her small chest.
Someone comes into my room in the mornings, not always, but very early whenever it happens. I think it’s Baba. I used to
be scared, but not any more. But he disappears as soon as I open my eyes. I know it’s him because the room always feels wonderful after
.

There was a marked change in the news coverage of the trial. The focus of the press shifted from the defendants in Berlin to their suspected commanders. Article after article trailed the bloody footprints of the killers around the globe until they reached Tehran, where Bruno Jost’s shadow had fallen over Minister Fallahian.

On March 14, the federal high court granted the prosecutor’s request. An arrest warrant was issued for Iran’s intelligence minister. The warrant surpassed the exiles’ greatest hopes. The trial’s most ambitious victims—Parviz and Shohreh—were satisfied; its most discriminating observers, such as Hamid, were similarly content. Judge Kubsch asked Bruno Jost to submit to his court all the material he had submitted to the federal court, and set an end date for the trial: June 25, 1996. He instructed the prosecutor and the attorneys on both sides to prepare their closing arguments.

No sooner had the judge made his announcement than Bernd Schmidbauer relayed a request to postpone the closing date. A letter from Tehran had reached his office, offering two new witnesses. Bruno Jost, enraged by the move, called it an outright sabotage. Ehrig went even further and called it organized legal vandalism. Yet Judge Kubsch granted the motion and called off the closing till the court had heard from the new witnesses.

The end had slipped away once more. The witnesses were in Tehran. To find, train, and dispatch a team to them was an infinite ordeal. Yet again, Tehran had stonewalled the court and, as the exiles saw it, Judge Kubsch had conceded. In their despair, Ehrig’s pearl of wisdom eluded everyone:
In a case as big as this, surprises are always to be expected. Time may work just as in their favor as against them
.

17

Nietzsche’s famous
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
finally cleared the censors at the ministry of culture when its title was changed to
Thus Spoke the Ayatollah
.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

Far away from Berlin, on a March day in 1996, Tehran was as it always is before Nowrouz, the Iranian New Year marking the arrival of spring. The news—good or bad—goes unheeded, and newspapers remain unfolded. The streets teem with passersby bearing bags full of holiday purchases. Joy adds a lilt to the peddlers’ calls as they drop portions of steaming boiled beets into paper cones. The police, seasonably mellow, turn a blind eye to undocumented sellers. Sidewalks become temporary bazaars for special holiday goods—the pyramids of unshelled walnuts, mounds of ole-aster, trays of wheat sprouts, rows of goldfish in glass bowls. Housewives sniff the simmering pots of wheat germ for the
traditional spread called “haft seen,” or lift the gills of the whitefish to find the freshest for the dinner of fish and herb rice. Husbands squeeze crates of pansies and bouquets of pussy willow into the overflowing trunks of their cars. Haji Firooz, the Persian Santa, dressed in red, with black-painted face, sings tunes and shakes his tambourine at intersections. The crowds linger until midnight for the half-off sale of unsold goods. By dawn, the ground is strewn with trash in the wake of the shoppers’ rampage. In the early morning light, budding leaves dabbed in dew glisten on the bare branches like emerald shards and the snowcapped peaks of the Alborz Mountains in the north shine majestically. The intoxicating scent of spring, what well- traveled Tehranis call “the best air anywhere,” lulls the city.

On just such a day, a black Mercedes pulled in front of a two-story home on Koohestan 9 in the city’s most affluent district. That brief stop, only a few minutes, changed the fate of the Mykonos trial in a way no one could have fathomed.

Minister Fallahian’s deputy emerged from the car. A full-cheeked man with an unruly beard and a receding hairline, he rang the bell of apartment #10 and whispered his name into the intercom: Emami.

The door was buzzed open but the deputy slid his foot in to keep it ajar and rang again.

“Can’t come up. Come down a minute!”

Moments later, a shorter, stouter version of him was standing at the threshold. The smile on the shorter man’s face quickly vanished for he could see the deputy’s look of distress.

“I don’t have much time and neither do you. You must pack and get out now,” the deputy said.

“Get out? Get out of where? Why?”

“Leave the country! They want to truckicide you. Fallahian’s orders! Can’t tell you how I know. That alone will kill you. Just go! Find a way to cross the border. Save your questions for later. Don’t tell anyone,
anyone,
you’re leaving! Border guards have orders to arrest you. How you go, I don’t know. But go, or they’ll have you gone their way. That’s what I came to say.”

The deputy grabbed the man’s shoulders and their beards brushed against each other in a hurried embrace. Then he disappeared into the backseat of the Mercedes and took off.

Behind the door, he remained frozen at the foot of the stairs. Standing barefoot in a white shirt and a pair of black pants, his eyes fixed to the ground, he was the portrait of a man fallen from grace.

The heirs to the 1979 revolution had come to devour him, one of their brightest children: Abulghassem (Far-had) Messbahi, born on December 17, 1957, the son of a prosperous factory owner, the third of five children in a devout Muslim family. At four, he had learned to read while eavesdropping on his brother’s lessons through the open
windows of the school yard. As a teenager, he gazed into the turquoise dome of the neighborhood mosque every night and prayed, spent summers at seminaries in Qom studying with the foremost clerics. He was among the youngest ever to enter Tehran University and mingle, a mere freshman, with the religious intelligentsia. In 1977 he signed up for the draft but deserted a year later, when the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini ordered all servicemen to abandon their posts. His next stop was inevitable, the only destination for a bright, religious twenty-one-year-old in 1978—the Rafah School, the Ayatollah’s Tehran headquarters, where he entered the inner circle.

On February 1, 1979, riding a motorbike, Messbahi shed tears of joy. The Ayatollah had returned from exile and he was one of the guards in his motorcade. By day’s end he was kneeling before the leader to kiss his hand, accepting his first official assignment. Messbahi’s rise had been swift: chief of Tehran’s largest military base, then senior diplomatic attaché to France before the year’s end. Under the guise of an attaché, he was to reinvent a new intelligence outpost in Europe. He recruited turncoats from among the opposition and deposited regular installments of cash for them in the hideouts of Hamburg, London, Lisbon, Rome, Geneva, or Brussels. His constant movement across the continent alarmed the French, who deported him and his wife in 1982.

Within days of returning to Tehran, he was promoted to chief of intelligence in Western Europe and flew to Brussels. Deportation brought him and his bride closer to each other.
She, too, joined the ministry to help his cause. Together, they would raise their baby daughter and their brand-new revolution. Adaptable and quick on his feet, he also served as chief negotiator for the release of Western hostages in Iran and in Lebanon, delivering the Ayatollah’s message to world leaders.

But each time he returned to Tehran to brief colleagues such as Fallahian, he saw a rift growing between them. He and his friend, Emami, believed they had to defeat the enemy with superior intelligence. They wanted to win in the battle of ideologies. Fallahian and his band argued for bloodshed. They wanted the enemy dead.

In 1987, returning to Tehran to deliver a letter for the Ayatollah from the former U.S. president Jimmy Carter—requesting the release of an American pilot held hostage—Messbahi was quickly flanked by two men on the tarmac of the airport.

“You’re going with us,” one of them whispered in his ear, then shoved him into a car.

Once they had blindfolded him, the blows came, pounding his face and stomach. Arresting him was absurd, he said to himself, a mistake for which he would receive profuse apologies and perhaps even a promotion. When he was thrown into a solitary cell, he thought someone would soon be on the way to release him. But the person who came only took him to a room where three others sat at a table and they took turns interrogating him, demanding that he admit to being a spy.

“Messbahi! These aren’t the days of the Shah,” the good interrogator reasoned. “You can’t outsmart anyone now. Come clean!”

The bad interrogator, flicking his fingers like he was about to squash a fly, barked, “This is what we do to rebels who won’t get in line, who are out of control, whose ways we can’t trust, who are too smart for their own good.”

His interrogators were reading to him from the manuals he had helped pen, asking him questions he had designed. They whipped him, then ordered him to write a detailed account of his “treasonous activities.”

“I’m not a spy,” he repeated over and over.

But when their fresh lashes struck the blisters of the old, he began to discover things he did not know about himself. Indeed, he had been a spy, if only they could help him recall for whom, if only they would help him compose the statement of his guilt.

They threw him back into the cell with a pen and a notepad to write a first draft. He was not to make a sound, much less speak, even to ask to be taken to the bathroom. To communicate, he could only tuck a note into the small groove in the wall outside his cell. Each word that escaped his lips cost him twenty lashes, each cough, ten, every sneeze, five.

He turned mute. Because he was not allowed a mirror, he would delay drinking his morning cup of tea until night, just so he could have a surface upon which to trace the contours of his face, lest he forget his own image. After a while, unable to shave, he saw the darkness of his own face disappear into
the darkness of the murky tea. He was no longer visible, not even to himself.

Then one morning after nearly four months, they told him to get ready for a visit to the barber. He was about to be granted a furlough. He dared not ask why.

The good interrogator drove him home, but home was not where he knew it to be.

“We thought it best to move your family. It was for your own good.”

He rang the bell of a strange door and prepared to behold his wife. But when the door opened, the look in her eyes was empty, loveless.

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” he could not help asking her.

“Of course!” she stammered. “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s just that I didn’t expect it.”

The good interrogator walked in with him, sat in his living room drinking tea like a guest. That day and every two weeks thereafter, he had to host him, his tormentor, in his own apartment—his harbor.

His friend Emami came to visit, bearing the gloomiest of news: his imprisonment was a declaration of victory by Fallahian and his gang. The ministry was now under their control and they had begun purging their old rivals, starting with him.

“Fine!” he said. “I’ll resign and get on.”

“Resign?” his friend exclaimed. “You can’t resign. School teachers resign. Intelligence operatives strike a bargain. You’re still the ministry’s employee. You need Fallahian’s consent to breathe the air you breathe.”

• • •

He went to see Fallahian, but Fallahian would not receive him. He appealed even to President Rafsanjani, and was assured that he would be safe and could go on to other things. Reinventing a life outside of politics intrigued him. It would be a chance to start anew, this time in business. No longer a spook, he fashioned himself into an entrepreneur. He built a factory to produce engine oil and named it Khazar. His old ties to Europe helped him grow fast. But the speed of his success only stirred Fallahian’s men. They came to extort shares so large that they exceeded his profits. He had no choice but to close the plant.

Standing frozen behind the door of his apartment building on that March day, he realized that even the president could not save him. He realized that his last and only friend, Emami, had risked everything by coming to him. He realized there was nothing left for him but to flee.

On the eve of the New Year, Messbahi packed his Samsonite briefcase with a comb, a toothbrush, a razor and some shaving cream, a pair of reading glasses, his old tattered volume of the Koran, and $25,000 in cash and headed for the south. His voyage was a gamble. He was betting everything on a seventeen-year-old promise. In his first post before going to Europe he had ordered the release of the chief of one of the largest tribes of the south. On a visit to Tehran, the chief had been arrested for carrying an unregistered gun. Messbahi—then a young and influential official, arguing that the detention could spark a mutiny in the south—had personally walked
the chief out of his holding cell. Stunned by the young and powerful savior, the chief, repeating Messbahi’s name under his lips, had vowed to return the favor if Messbahi ever happened upon his territory.

Messbahi was going to Zahedan hoping the chief was still alive, hoping he would still remember his vow from long ago, hoping he still commanded enough power to return the favor.

Night had fallen when he reached the chief’s compound. The gatekeeper took his name and went into the building. Moments later, a much older and grayer chief emerged and beamed at him. He grabbed him like a lost son who had finally returned.

“
Huzzah!
Come in, dear fellow! Welcome! A thousand welcomes!”

The chief’s reception was a boost of life to Messbahi, who was racing against death.

“Heaven knows I want to, but I must leave the country now,” Messbahi replied, certain that rejecting the chief’s offer would displease him.

“Are you in trouble?” The chief sounded puzzled. He knew Messbahi only as the impervious titan from the capital.

Messbahi nodded.

“
You
?” the chief slapped his thigh and exclaimed. “
You
in trouble with
them
? How could this be? You
are
them.”

Messbahi shook his head.

“It can’t be. You’re humoring an old man.”

“I must get out tonight. Will you help me or should I go on my own?”

The chief thundered, “Go on your own? Stop the nonsense, son! You’re not going anywhere in the middle of the night. Come in! Eat and rest! We’ll take this up tomorrow.”

Seeing Messbahi’s reluctance, the chief repeated, “Get in, son! You’re a guest at my home now, and no guest of mine has ever left without proper welcome. Get in!”

The chief ushered his guest into a room and ordered a servant to prepare a meal. Then, speaking in the local dialect, he addressed his young assistant and the two disappeared into another room, busily talking.

At six o’clock the next morning the chief awakened Messbahi.

“Rise and shine, son!” he said with affection.

They ate breakfast together and afterward the chief handed him a tribal Salwar costume to put on—loose-fitting white pants and a knee-length shirt and vest and said before heading to the street, “Get your things together. We’re leaving!”

A dark Buick bearing Iranian plates awaited him at the gates. The chief opened the car door and Messbahi was surprised to find several people already inside—the chief’s wife, daughter, son, and two grandchildren. He patted Messbahi on the back, whispering in his ear, “I won’t leave you until I put your hand in the hand of a trusted friend at the other side of the border.”

The sound of the revving engine faded into the rushing tires on the gravel road. If their destination had a name, no one spoke it. It hailed that morning, a ferocious downpour the likes of which the region had not seen in decades. When
the hail let up, the rain came. Through hail and rain, the driver pressed on. At every checkpoint, Messbahi witnessed what he, being a believer, could only call a small miracle. Twice the guards, recognizing the plate numbers of their car, simply bowed and remained doubled over until it passed. At others, the driver stopped, rolled down the window, and exchanged a sentence or two before the bars parted to let them through.